This Site Shows What It’s Like To Have Dyslexia

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4 Mar 2016 12:00 AM

Michael Hafford

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Neurological or learning differences can seem impossible to understand.

How can we know what it’s like to have synesthesia? Or autism? Or how someone with a cochlear implant hears the world? Dyslexia, the most common reading difference, is on the list of things that don’t entirely track to those that don’t have it.

This site attempts to put its reader in the shoes of someone with dyslexia.

“A friend who has dyslexia described to me how she experiences reading. She can read, but it takes a lot of concentration, and the letters seems to 'jump around,'" the site’s introduction reads.

The effect is accomplished by using Javascript to make the letters inside the words switch places at random. While nothing is impossible to read, it makes you think about each word for a second longer than normal.

It’s important to note that not every person with dyslexia experiences it the same way. This, however, seems to be getting it pretty close.

“When someone with dyslexia like myself says things look like they 'jump around' they do not mean it literally,” one commenter writes. “Those are just the closeish words for what is rather more hard to describe. It more like your prescription of things are wonky. Think of that moment you are looking at an optical illusion when a thing you're looking [at] is suddenly something else, a vase becomes a face. It's like that kinda with the structure of words constantly conceptually unstable.”

It’s worth checking out. You could gain an appreciation for the difficulty a friend might have reading or doing math.